Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SEO!

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About This Course

Published 7/2014
English

Course Description

Search engine optimization doesn't have to be difficult, and you certainly don't need to buy expensive software or hire an expensive agency. Gaining an understanding of how search engines function and the quick tweaks you can make to your website to rank higher will help you increase your traffic and—ultimately—grow your business.

Join over 1,900 students who have learned search engine optimization (SEO) and are optimizing their websites and increasing their rankings without spending a dime.

Paired with quizzes, helpful content, and a few tips here and there, you'll get a taste of everything involved with increasing the search visibility of your website.

Here's what a few of my favorite students had to say:

"I thought that I knew something about SEO, but this course has shown me
that I have a lot to learn. I'm going to have to watch it over, and
over to make certain that I do things the correct way." – Craig

“This is a fantastic course, especially for the price. There is a lot of information packed into about an hour of lecture, so you can move through it fairly quickly while still getting a ton of resources. Highly recommend." – Briana

“I would recommend this class to any serious Digital Marketer who is interested in SEO practices. This cheap course provides great and in depth study of SEO practices done the correct way. Evan simply goes above and beyond." – Christian

All the Information You Need to Master Search Engine Optimization

Imagine what it would be like to handle the SEO of your website yourself, without having to fork over piles of cash to a search agency. With any luck, at the end of this course, you'll feel confident enough to take the reins and get your site to that top spot all on your own.

In dozens of easy-to-understand videos, I will uncover the secrets of conquering the practice of search engine optimization. These videos are delivered online so you can watch them from the comfort of your own home. By incorporating intermittent quizzes, you can be sure you comprehend the most important concepts and keep yourself motivated to stay attentive.

Course Overview

As any search engine optimizer will tell you, successful SEO starts with keywords. This course will start by walking you through my go-to strategies for finding keywords that are relevant for your target audience. The next step in the process is analyzing the keywords and prioritizing them based on effectiveness. I'll show you how to calculate the Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI), a good starting point for anyone new to the practice of SEO.

With a list of highly effective keywords in hand, the course will move to teach students how to properly optimize their content. You will learn how to best incorporate your keywords and how often to employ your keywords on each page. The course will also explain the differences between the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Once your web content is optimized for search engines, you'll want to start attracting more visitors and search engine crawlers. The course will take an in-depth look at the most effective and popular strategies for building links.

And, last but not least, you will learn how to track your progress so that you can always be improving.

What are the requirements?

You will need Mozilla Firefox installed on your computer. Any web browser will work for the majority of the course, but Rank Checker (a tool that we will discuss) from SEOBook only runs on Firefox.

You will need a basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel. We will be listing keywords in a workbook and using Excel formulas to rank them based on effectiveness.

You will need access to the Internet to follow along through the various tools we will go over.

What am I going to get from this course?

Prepare you for keyword research and analysis. The key to effective SEO is keywords (pun intended)! I’ll show you the methods to take and considerations to make when pinpointing keywords.

Walk you through content optimization. Where and how you place keywords on your page matters. I’ll provide an easy-to-replicate process for effective keyword sprinkling!

Teach you how build links and track your progress. Once your content is filled with keywords, you’ll want to gather links to show Google you’re serious. I’ll explain what works best and show you the tools for benchmarking your progress.

What is the target audience?

This video course is a step-by-step explanation of what search engine optimization is and how to do it. SEO beginners will learn the concepts and best practices of search engine optimization.

More advanced learners can brush up on their terminology and pinpoint areas for improvement within their own methods.

What you get with this course?

Not for you? No problem.30 day money back guarantee.

Forever yours.Lifetime access.

Learn on the go.Desktop, iOS and Android.

Get rewarded.Certificate of completion.

Curriculum

When you hear the term “search engine,” or even “search engine optimization,” your first instinct is probably to think of the almighty Google. And, in doing so, you’d be both right and wrong. Google is definitely the powerhouse, and there are many who use “SEO” and “Optimizing for Google” interchangeably. However, we must be careful not to forget about the other two big players: Bing and Yahoo!

Despite how it may seem with all of Google’s philanthropic and extracurricular endeavors, the primary technology of the company is search. Google, Yahoo!, and, dare I say, Bing are all about taking the word or phrase you are searching for, finding all of the relevant content, and ranking it based on quality. They do all of this for you.

By now, you probably have some idea as to what search engine optimization is for; You now know the big three search engines of whose attention we will be vying for; and, you know how they function. But, what exactly is it?

Allegedly, there was a time when simply creating a website was enough, just make a website and the people will come; however, this ideal world no longer exists. The quest for gaining and maintaining those top slots on SERPS can spur sleepless nights, Carpal tunnel syndrome, and the ever-so-inevitable headache. But, the payoff can be grand!

Stop and think for a second: Let’s say that you’re craving a chocolate chip cookie, but you don’t know how to bake. What exactly are you typing into that Google search bar? “Chocolate chip cookie”? “Chocolate chip cookie recipe”? “How to bake a chocolate chip cookie”? These search terms are known as keywords and are the basis of any SEO campaign.

Google Analytics is the go-to tracking software for website owners. It’s free and requires minimal know-how to get it integrated into your website. It’s also quite robust. Google Analytics provides a ton of information: From simple things like amount of traffic, to more advanced things like visitor navigation flows.

Bing Ads Intelligence is a pretty useful keyword research tool that allows you to expand on your keyword lists within Microsoft Excel. It’s important to note that the performance aspect of the add-in—which we will see shortly—is tailored for Yahoo! and Bing. But, anyway, for now we’ll be downloading it and using it for keyword research.

All good search engine optimizers are Internet spies. Like all marketers, we must keep a close eye on the competition, learn from their mistakes, and, most importantly, learn from their successes. In this video, we’ll talk about competitive keyword research.

I’m sure by now you’ve spent hours upon hours creating that huge seed list of keywords. Obviously, it’s a bit unrealistic to think that we’ll be able to target and manage optimization efforts for all of these keywords, when really all we want is a few dozen. To boil it down, we need a way to determine which of these keywords and phrases are the most relevant and will generate the best results.

One way to quickly determine the effectiveness of keywords is by calculating what’s called the Keyword Efficiency Index (or KEI). The KEI measures the SEO impact of individual keywords, by comparing the frequency with which the keyword is used in search queries with the number of competing sites making use of that keyword. And, to improve the traditional formula, I like to include a way to weight the keywords based on how relevant they are to the project.

You’ve created a seed list of keywords and you’ve taken the first step (by calculating the KEI) towards determining which ones will be effective. Most likely you’re still sitting on a list that’s too big, and—as I mentioned before—we can’t base our keyword selection entirely on the KEI. The next level of sizing down we’ll perform is determining whether or not the search volume has increased or decreased over a period of time.

We’ve tackled two levels of analysis already. We’ve considered the relationship between competition and search volume in calculating the KEI, and we’ve nixed the keywords that don’t seem to be trending very well. In this video, we’ll talk about the final—but probably the most important—layer of keyword analysis in which we consider searcher intent.

SEO is typically divided into two areas: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization (also known as content optimization) covers all SEO activities that are done on your website. Activities include page content, site structure, and the like. Conversely, off-page optimization covers social media, linking building, and all SEO activities that occur anywhere outside of your website.

Before we start redrafting our entire website, we’re going to create a keyword-to-page matrix. This matrix is a list of the pages you would like to optimize paired with the keywords you will incorporate into the page.

In this video, we’re going to talk about redrafting our content, using our keywords, for search engines. There are two aspects we must consider when redrafting our pages: First, where the keywords must be placed and, second, how often we use them. In this video, we will take the latter.

You’ve made it to the real reason you started watching these videos. Let’s start by getting on the same page regarding how we refer to the different pieces of a page. We’ll start with page tags. “Tags” is a term given to things like page titles, first headings (also known as H1), meta-tags, and meta-descriptions. Understanding what each tag is and what each tag does is important to perfecting any SEO campaign.

You probably know that adding images to pages is a good way to add some aesthetic appeal to your text. However, you may not realize that images can help generated traffic from image-based search engines—Google Images, for example.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a three step process: First, you must select the most effective and relevant keywords to be sprinkled all over your website. Second, you have to optimize usability, site functionality, and on-page text—including the integration of the keywords you’ve recently selected. Lastly, is link building.

When it comes to link building, failing to plan is equivalent to planning to fail. Therefore, it is important for all ready-to-go link builders to take a step back and prepare. Link building is not as easy as submitting your URL to a directory, or selecting a “category” from a dropdown list. Link building is founded on the creation of content, and effective link building consists of packaging that content in the correct way.

It’s not the first time you’ve heard it, and it won’t be the last. Developing high quality content is one of the purest forms of link building. If you create something that’s helpful, relevant, and attractive, people will line up to share it and link to it.

In this video, we’re going to head a little closer to home for most of you. We’ll talk about using social networking and social bookmarking channels to generate links. Social media networks are some of the best ways to grow your links.

Submitting websites to directories may make you a little nervous, but directory submissions is a legitimate SEO practice—as long as the directories are relevant and of quality. All in all, niche directories provide a link as well as niche traffic.

In this video, we’ll learn about using Google Webmasters Tools to monitor the health of our website. Note that we’ll only look at a fraction of the functionalities of which the tool consists; however, we will go over the basics to get you started.

PageRank was the first algorithm that Google used to rank websites in their search engine results. In fact, it was named after Larry Page. PageRank is still used to day as one way to measure the importance of website pages.

Google Analytics, for those of you who don’t know, is a dashboard offered by Google that you can plug-in to your website and generate a load of detailed metrics and information about your website’s traffic, the sources of said traffic, the behavior of your visitors, and your conversions.

In addition to search traffic, a key performance indicator of your SEO campaign is your rank in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for the keywords you’ve targeted. Whether you already have a website or you are planning on creating one, it is a good idea to track how well you are ranking.

With data regarding your ranking improvements in hand, you will now want to cross-reference how many links you've generated. This way, you will have a rough estimation about how many links you will need to get that top spot.

SEO takes time. You have to be determined, systematic, and strong-minded. Above everything else, you have to have a strategy. Hopefully, this series of videos has helped you better understand the concept of SEO and supplied you with the tools to get started.

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Instructor Biography

A few years ago, I decided to mush my design and digital marketing skills together and try my hand at creating online courses. It took me a few weeks to publish my first course on Udemy, and it’s been pretty smooth sailing ever since. Now, I want to help you do the same thing!

I recently launched Instructory with the intention of building an online school that empowers aspiring instructors like yourself with the know-how and tools needed to create online courses. The goal of Instructory is to teach you how to prepare, produce, publish and promote extremely profitable online courses.